THE AUSTRALIAN – JOHN McCALLUM
30 APRIL 2007

'WE are good people." In this fascinating moral thriller Angela and Tim, a successful professional couple, persist in believing so, apparently sincerely, as they are drawn relentlessly into terrible actions. Perhaps they have already committed some. What makes the play so absorbing is what it doesn't reveal, except in brief hints beautifully placed to tease our suspicions.

The action is brief and classically simple. At the beginning the couple is confronted by a mysterious young man, Dez, who claims to have had an affair with Angela and to be hurt that she doesn't now acknowledge him. Perhaps it is true. She is suddenly pregnant after years of trying with Tim. Or perhaps Dez is a stalker.

Whatever the case, the play spins out into something very different from the usual middle-class comedy of moral angst when Angela and Tim hire Dick, a classic private eye in trench coat and wig, to help them, they claim, save Dez from his delusion. Dick, played superbly with great febrile energy by Simon Burke, comes not only from a different world but from a different dramatic genre and his intrusion into the couple's comfortable life is much more sinister than anything we see Dez doing. Dick is comically hyperactive, paranoid and sleazy, and he has a weird vision of his mission in the world that is funny for a while until he finally takes off his silly disguises and turns savage.
The production, acutely directed by Julian Meyrick, and with terrific set, lighting and sound designs by Jo Briscoe, Bernie Tan and Nick Wishart, homes in on the ambiguous moments that give the play its power.

Simone McAullay and Christopher Stollery, as the supposedly loving couple, keep staring at each other across the empty space of their apartment, afraid to acknowledge their complicity in Dick's sinister world, their declarations of love for each other made hollow by their actions. Ed Wightman is also very good as Dez, caught between the two worlds of the play. He could be a rebellious innocent or a brooding trickster. He has a great moment, in one of the most brutal scenes of this darkly funny show, when he seems to wake up and spit in everyone's eye.
The play is a parable of post-September 11 paranoia, hence the title. For how long, it asks, can middle-class Westerners, with that soft confused look in their eyes that McAullay and Stollery do so well, go on saying complacently to each other that they are good people?

 

THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD – MARK HOPKINS
30 APRIL 2007

'In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Ian Wilding's October uses black humour to explore what self-proclaimed "good people" might sanction to restore a feeling of safety.

Tim (Christopher Stollery), is an airline pilot who avoids turbulence and Angela (Simone McAullay), his wife, an interior designer with a passion for making homes beautiful. The couple, twin towers of civilised restraint and urbane affluence, find the unsolicited allegations of Dez (Ed Wightman), an apparent stranger, highly disturbing. As their sense of security is further undermined by his lurking presence, they find the services of the morally dubious private investigator Dick (Simon Burke) increasingly acceptable.

There is an uncomfortable edge to the laughter in this world premiere of a new Australian work, as values teeter and moral absolutes crumble. Wilding achieves thought-provoking engagement with his political parody through character interaction that defies expectation. Dez is the most emotionally sincere and sympathetic character, with so little exposition as to sustain intrigue in regard to motivation and behaviour.

Wightman accentuates the humanity of this provocateur with a relaxed physicality and natural rhythms of speech. Tim and Angela are never allowed to appear real, their dialogue stylised to mirror the artificially clean, cold lines of their environment at work and at home. (Jo Briscoe's set is appropriately clinical and impersonal, its airport terminal-modern apartment duality a dark parody of domestic familiarity turned sinister.) Stollery elicits humour and tension from conflict between the physical impulse to lash out and practised verbal civility. McAullay sustains a path of emotional estrangement for Angela, her detachment uncomfortably cool, her role in the creation and resolution of the crisis implicitly dark.
Burke has the challenge of realising the bizarrely theatrical and sinister Dick, a private investigator who relishes bad wigs and false facial hair, rehearses offensive cross-examination and delivers lines of deliberately forced humour. This character seems intentionally conceived to make the audience cringe, a manic self-parody of evil to fight evil. Burke's few moments of understatement are truly menacing, the heightened energy of Dick's habitual persona at times so deliberately beyond laughter as to be uncomfortable to watch.

Indeed, the director, Julian Meyrick, has clearly set out to accentuate all that is uncomfortable in Wilding's October. His uncluttered production ensures no easy answers arise to Wilding's hard questions about the values we chose to preserve when confronted by terror close to home.

 

© 2007 Simon Burke